Irony has often strange ways to show and give meaning even to a terrible and dishonest film like this one.
The story is that the former lover of the president of a football team (FC.Porto) becomes estranged from him and decides to write a book denouncing alleged sports corruption and gangster type behaviour from that president's administration during the years she was with him. In a country like Portugal where maybe more than half the football fans support the opponent, usually loosing football club (Benfica), this had the potential to sell (books, film tickets, whatever...). The former lover teams up with a ghost-writer who's also a sport's journalist who passionately supports Benfica. The book comes out and they decide in the meanwhile to make a movie based on it. Depending on who you ask the purposes are threefold: money and revenge for the former lover, trying to invert to stop the winning streak of FC.Porto (the writer) and money (the producer who came along).
Caught in the middle of this is Botelho, married to the ghost-writer. He is a relatively talentless director, but he usually tries to make real cinema. But the combination here was to explosive for him, he was too much outside his element. So in the end he (and his writer wife) become estranged from the producer and neglect the film. Apparently the director alleges some difference of opinion regarding soundtrack (he wanted classical and jazz, the producer wanted contemporary pop).
Anyway, what i got to watch, streamed and forgotten in youtube, is a total mess: Botelho uses the Oliveira blocking (static shots, people facing the camera while having a dialogue etc.) to tell a sleazy story and that isn't even good sleaze. The sexy scenes are not sexy enough, nor even good exploitation, the dialogue is mediocre and so on. But mostly the film is dishonest. A number of characters are bad, very bad, the others are good very good. Everybody (even Breyner) is absolutely lost in this mess. The idea print an idea in people's heads (the president is bad and corrupt that's why his team wins, all the other people are good). They even change the origin of the woman (from Brazilian to Porto accent Portuguese) to avoid the predictable prejudice the Portuguese average viewer might have towards Brazilians. And the final dishonesty is a scene when Sofia is meeting her book editor: behind her are a number of photos of famous Portuguese writers and in a certain shot you get her head in medium close up mimicking the head of Florbela Espanca, seen in the background. For a director who prides himself to adapt to the screen the biggest writers in Portugal (Pessoa, Queirós, Mendes Pinto) to establish a comparison between a writer revealing some sleaze in a book to one of our greatest woman writers must have been heart-breaking. Oh love forces you to some terrible moves sometimes. No wonder he took the music cue and left the project.
I looked for this film because now, 10 years later, we have the courts and police investigating Benfica for corruption, justice officials and police bribing and so on. I wonder what film will these people do... Funny. The irony...
